“All of your supplies and uniforms have been delivered to your room, sir. You should find everything you need there already unpacked for you.”

“Great,” Rogers said dryly. “And where is that, exactly?”

“Room 101G in officer berthing area C, quarterdeck.”

Rogers’ fists clenched. That wasn’t the engineering unit’s berthing area. He had a bad feeling about this.

“Suresh,” he said. “Does it, by any chance, say what unit I’m assigned to?”

Suresh glanced down, and his eyes widened. “Congratulations again, sir! It says here you’ve been assigned as Commander, Artificial Intelligence Ground Combat Squadron.”

Droids. He was in charge of droids.

“That son of a bitch,” Rogers said.

After making Suresh print out the paperwork required for him to ride the intraship transportation system, Rogers shoved it in the in-line guardwoman’s face and went as fast as he could to the quarterdeck. He wasn’t a huge fan of delaying the inevitable, and lying down on his bed sounded pretty good right now anyway. The sooner he got settled, the sooner he could start figuring out how to get out of this assignment and back to something easy like fixing engines and drinking beer.

A quick transfer from the in-line to the up-line to another in-line left him in the quiet, clean officer living area known as the quarterdeck. He’d used to joke it was because officers only had a quarter of a brain, but that didn’t seem quite as funny now. Unlike the enlisted quarters, in which most troops under the rank of sergeant shared a room with one or two others, each officer had his or her own room. The hallways, instead of sporting the same drab, austere metal surface, were tastefully decorated with a combination of artificial wainscoting and various works of art depicting historical wartime spectacles.^I It had that upper-class, old-world aristocratic feeling, like someone was about to emerge from a reading room in a smoking vest holding a pipe and challenge Rogers to cribbage.

It even smelled different, though that could have been a subtle contribution from the zoo deck, which was located directly below. Every command ship in the fleet had a zoo deck for morale purposes (and a biosphere to help generate oxygen, but that was generally regarded as secondary).

Rogers immediately didn’t like it, though he was thankful that the artwork already on the walls prevented the display of any more of those strange motivational posters. He particularly didn’t like the fact that after exiting the in-line, he saw no fewer than six shinies rolling down the hallway, one of which seemed to be carrying a disruptor rifle in a holster on its back. Rogers frowned; giving weapons to AI was a big no-no in the military. He’d learned that the hard way when he’d distributed bubble guns to a bunch of droids to see if he could stir up trouble. It was probably the only prank he ever regretted.

But now here they were, with real, no-kidding weapons. They were considered unstable, if useful, and they’d never been programmed for combat before. And Rogers was supposed to command them?